CNN
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Eritrea has punished the families of thousands of draft evaders during a conscription campaign aimed at stepping up military operations in neighboring Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
A 71-year-old woman was arbitrarily detained and expelled from her home as authorities tried to locate her missing relatives, a US-based rights group said in a report.
Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
The HRW report, based on interviews with more than a dozen people who fled the country and relatives of those caught up in the conscription campaign, provides a glimpse into how the secretive country has strengthened its military. can do. Military operations in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
Security forces went door-to-door to identify draft evaders and detainees who could not account for their missing family members.
A resident of the capital, Asmara, told Human Rights Watch that “everyone lives in fear of being drafted, but this is a whole other level.”
Since fighting a border dispute with Ethiopia in 1998-2000, Eritrea has conscripted men and unmarried women over the age of 18 into indefinite military or government service.
Yemane told Eritrean media last year that some reservists had been called up, but said the government had not mobilized the entire population.
Eritrea last June report The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea pointed to forced conscription among other violations.
It said it deeply deplored the attack on “the National Service Programme, the backbone of Eritrea’s defense capability that affirms its right to self-defense, its right to live in peace without any threat and to defend its sovereignty”.
Eritrean forces fought in support of Ethiopian forces during the two-year war against Tiglayan forces in the region.
Large-scale fighting ended with the signing of a ceasefire in November, but Eritrea had not signed the agreement. still exist Part of Tigre.
Eritrea views the Tigra People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that leads the Tigrayan army, as an enemy. The border dispute occurred when the TPLF was in control of Ethiopia’s federal government.
Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki said Thursday that reports that Eritrean forces had committed human rights abuses during the conflict in Tigray were “fantasy” and “misinformation”.
At a press conference in Nairobi, Afwerki described the allegations of human rights abuses by the Eritrean army as “a fantasy and a misinformation factory of those who sought to derail the peace process.”
